If You Give a Worm Some Wine

*

Author’s note: This is a very casually written story. This is also a mostly true story.

*

Despite dreading the party—any party—I found it was much easier to socialize with strangers when they wore zombie makeup or a bright orange wig or had a plastic ax sticking out of their head. I was exceptionally comfortable that evening because I’d lazily chosen to be a pig in a blanket. I wore pigs’ ears, pink clothes, and I had a fuzzy blanket wrapped around my shoulders. It might as well have been a pajama party for me. All in all, I found myself not failing miserably at being a party guest. It helped that there was a clown for entertainment. Minnie, the golden retriever, sported a blue, yellow, and red polka-dotted bandanna and was the center of attention whenever the conversation lulled, at which point she became the conversation. Until the center of attention shifted.

See, one of the hosts’ sister was in attendance. The host’s teenage sister.

Yes, I know, teenagers drink all the time. Don’t be a narc; it’s normal. I’ll have you know it wasn’t normal for me, so I had my buzz-kill eye on her…waiting. She had a perfume of drama about her that wafted across the room toward me. Everything she said was exaggerated. Her life was so difficult, and she had been so wronged by gentleman a, b, c, x,y, and z. I tried not to absorb her theatrics. 

Ignoring her became impossible once she’d poured a glass of red.

It was quite literally like flipping a switch.

One moment, she was just a teenager. The next, she warranted a psych evaluation. It was the kind of transformation that made hearts thud. We didn’t know what she would do. She seemed angry at her older sister. Would she try to fight? She seemed considerably uncoordinated after just a few sips. Would she ruin my friends’ carpet? She seemed not to know where the lines stood…so which would she cross? 

No one was paying attention to the puppy anymore, but I was. I wanted Minnie to transport me into her world of happy ignorance. I didn’t want to be there with a ticking explosive of a girl whose grip on the wine glass bordered possessive, who was screaming at her sister and ruining the vibe. Turns out, it was crucial that I stayed.

You never know when you’re going to need a boringly cautious person (me and one other person) on hand. It would be nice if there were more than two to go around, at least. Nope, my club was a lonely one. Even the smart kids liked to get trashed.

When we realized the wine-sloshed, unhinged teenage sister of the host was no longer in the house…well, everyone wished they weren’t.

I’m sober, I said grudgingly. I’ll drive us around so we can find her.

So I had two tipsy folks in my car (and the other designated driver had two folks in his) and we were all panicked about the missing girl, and I was just driving around in the dark as half the street carried on with their Halloween festivities. We got out every now and then to shout into the trees. We even had to ask a house party, have you seen this girl? We made two laps of the area. Her sister was freaking the fuck out, and I was just trying to drive without hitting drunk people in the dark (okay, it wasn’t that serious, but I didn’t like my role in this debacle). 

At the beginning of our third lap, maybe a block from the hosts’ house, we found her literally lying in the leaves on the side of the road. There were some dudes nearby—like a couple houses down—and we warily asked them to lift her into the car because she was legit resisting her sister like a worm. She was acting like we were kidnapping her. Her sister was crying. I stayed in the car, gripping the steering wheel despite the gear being in Park. They literally had to shove her in my backseat. She screamed at her sister as we turned around and headed back. She started moaning, I don’t want to go. You can’t take me. Then her head lolled into semi-consciousness, and I prayed very hard that she NOT vomit on my fabric seats. The mercy that she did not vomit in my car, well, that might have been the only silver lining of the night.

Her sister dragged her upstairs, and we had to listen to her scream some more once we got back to the house. Seven of us were sitting downstairs on the kitchen floor, processing. Sobering up, whether we’d imbibed or not. In the meantime, the other teenager in attendance was vomiting and crying in the bathroom adjacent to the kitchen. I had to stop my friend from drinking too much vodka out of guilt for allowing teenagers at the party. Nobody was enjoying the night. Also, people still looked like zombies and killer clowns and Waldo and Frankenstein, and I was still, well, I was at least a blanket. I’d ditched the pig parts in the car.

The whole time I sat on that kitchen floor—until the screaming and puking and guilt-drinking stopped—I thought how ironic that my first “alcohol party” was a textbook example of the adage, “Don’t drink, kids.” I hated that I’d submitted to the peer pressure of attending in the first place. I almost wished I had drunk something, so I wouldn’t be feeling everything I was feeling. 

The next morning, I was at the car wash, vacuuming leaves from the backseat of my car. I laughed to myself because I’d been putting off a car wash for weeks, and having a drunk girl slumped on my seats was what finally got me there. I also vowed to avoid a repeat, but I actually did attend the same friend’s Halloween party the following year. Except I only stayed for the pre-gaming because I didn’t want to be around for what came next.